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Using the Cold Clone 3.0.3 ISO with vSphere 5

As many know, the Cold Clone ISOs have been discontinued and support has been removed from VMware. This is quite unfortunate especially when you get into the business of P2V’ing items like domain controllers, SQL servers, and other pesky boxes.

I understand the converters from VMware have improved by leaps and bounds over what it was in version 3, but there’s still a reasonable amount of security in P2V’ing a box while it’s completely down with no running services whatsoever.

First issue I ran into while attempting to P2V an old SQL server was finding the ISO. It has almost been removed from the internet as a whole. So I’ve uploaded it here: Cold Clone 3.0.3 Link

Second issue, boot time. It took me literally 15 minutes from the point of “hitting a button to boot to disc” to the point of accepting the EULA.

Third issue, drivers. I was lucky enough for the internal NICs to be found but the add-on NICs were not. To put this into perspective, the server I was working on was an HP G5. I tested with an HP G6 and it did not find any NICs at all.

Fourth issue, disappearing network settings. Every time I went to the networking settings, they would be cleared. The settings held as long as I clicked apply and then ok, but the second you went back to the network config menu I had to renter all the info.

Fifth issue, vCenter integration. It’s not exactly shocking that it didn’t work with vCenter, but I was hopeful. The converter would go through and recognize everything out of vCenter, but then ran into a bunch of issues as soon as the clone actually starts. Such as:

How I actually got it to work was by sending the P2V directly to a specific ESXi 5 host. Once I did that, I could P2V the system to the locally attached storage or the FC attached storage. I attached the vNIC to a standard vSwitch.

VMconverter5 has a known SSL bug. If you edit c:\\programdata\\vmware converter standalone\\converter-worker.xml and scroll down to the nfc section, set useSSL to false. Then reboot and the speed will go up dramatically.

[…] I found one guy who appears to have an ISO for version 3.0.3 of vConverter posted to his site for download, but I’m eternally skeptical about downloading these types of software from random strangers: http://thatcouldbeaproblem.com/?p=584 […]